Librarian by Day

Yesterday’s  23 Thing Summit was great and intense (audio, slides, chat and Twitter!)  There were almost 300 attendees (I think). WebJunction and MaintainIT staff did a great job wrangling the presenters and the attendees.  Thank you Brenda, Michael, Jennifer and everyone else!

If you couldn’t make it, you can find the slides, audio and chat transcripts here and David took some notes. There was even a Twitter hash tag  #23smt, which popped up on Twitter trends about 40 minutes in.

I’m at the Missouri Library Association Conference this week and today was the first of my two presentations.  Originally Robin & I were going to co-present (we each write half the lessons) but because she’s so crazy busy and I felt bad for bailing on her for the MaintianIT Webinar, I offered to do this one on my own.

Library Learning 2.1

Library Learning 2.0

I saw and participated in a discussion on this on one of my email lists last week. I thought I’d take more time to write out my thoughts and responses on my blog.  Sarah posted this over in MaintainIT but it looks like she didn’t open it up for comments so I’m going to.

Here is part of the email I sent the list

One of the problems I’ve seen with 2.0 is the library runs out and gets a blog or facebook page or whatever and declares themselves 2.0. They don’t consider who they are trying to reach, what they are trying to accomplish, how they will accomplish it or measure success. We need to take the same approach to 2.0 that we’ve taken to library services for years. Not every tool will work for every library and community. Some libraries have wildly successful film programs or extensive tools for small businesses, but not every library does. We look at what our community needs and what works best for them. The same approach should be taken with your web tools.

My answer is yes.  I think there are many aspects of Library 2.0 (and web 2.0) that are providing better service to our patrons.  Right now I’m using a blog to create a new Readers Advisory service for our patrons.  Learning 2.0 & Learning 2.1 teach our staff about technology and terms our patrons are using that they might now have known about before.

I can go on and on with examples and arguments, but what I really want to know is What do you think?  Do you have some great examples of Library 2.0 or Web 2.0 is helping (or not helping)?  Is the objection to 2.0 that we’re placing a value judgment on it that we don’t apply to traditional services ( and by that I mean when we order the latest romance or horror novel)? Are we doing a disservice to our patrons by having a blog?  Are gaming events a waste of our valuable time?  What should we be doing with our time?

Lesson 20 of Library Learning 2.1 has just gone up, which means we’re about a half way through this years lessons.  We’ve got some late starters which is great.  I was a bit too busy at the beginning of the year to offer as much encouragement as I’d hoped to be able to.  I’m also not above resorting to bribes.  Check out these awesome foam swords I got in Target’s dollar bin.  I made sure lots of people know they are in the Box o’ Fun!

It’s goni

As part of our Library Learning 2.1 program I wrote a post about Pandora, it went live to the staff yesterday and they are just loving it. Imagine my surprise when I see a comment from Lucia, a staff member at Pandora. How exciting! She left some great tips along with these comments:

It’s great to hear that librarians are loving Pandora! I myself left a library gig to work at Pandora.

I can see how headphones + pandora may be necessary in a library, at times, since you can’t exactly crank the speaker volume up to “10.”

Francesca: Feel free to tell Jim Scott to send us a CD, and we’ll take a listen. Any time you find we don’t have artists in our collection you think we should have, feel free to email suggest-music at pandora dot com.

What great customer service! They found us, answered some of our concerns, made suggestions and left some great tips!

Today kicks off our second week of Library Learning 2.1. Robin already wrote a great post about our kick off week, so I wont duplicate it by writing one here. But I did get some great feed back that I want to share.

• They love the “bit size” lessons “I did the first lesson – short and sweet. Perfect!”
• They’re thrilled that these lessons can also be used by patrons. If they get questions about any of the topics they have a resource they can point them to.
• They are just exited to be learning! “Sounds interesting. I’m looking forward to what you and Robin come up with this year. “

Ok sometimes my geekiness surprises even me. Most of the big decisions for LL2.1 have been made for a while now, the prizes were agreed upon, lessons have been written (just not posted), I’m just waiting for the kick off. I have spent countless hours brain storming, thinking up plans and incentives, writing lessons, talking to staff, talking to my boss, antagonizing over why people didn’t participate last time and will they participate this time? So the last couple of weeks, kinda blah. But today, today it all pays off. The first lesson is Monday but today I sent my first staff email officially announcing the plan and kicking off the blog. I already have two comments. TWO! Remember we have less than 60 people working at the library so two on the first day is a lot. Even better, these commenters, they’re excited! Oh my! I hope we can live up to their expectations!